Home Team Advantage

The estimable Tony Myers, Ph.D. applies quantitative science to prove bias that we all know about but now he’s nailed it: Home Team Advantage.

Bias can creep into our sport’s outcomes for any number of reasons. We see it in a Las Vegas judge who voted 4-1 for the home town favorite, for example, even when the visitor was carving destiny’s child into two separate cover photos for us.

Because this kind of bias is measurable, maybe Tony can do for our sport what Billy Bean did for “Money Ball”. There’s an equally pernicious bias to be witnessed, also, in clueless judging. If Tony wants to test that hypothesis, expect a random distribution around the independent variable of applicable rules. Let a panel of experts staff the control group and compare their consensus to the tale of a judge’s dependent variable tape. Standard deviation from the experts’ mean would then give us probable cause for cleaning up our act.